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This study aimed to analyze common syntactic errors found in the argumentative essays of third-year English major students at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Van Lang University, Vietnam. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to obtain data in this study. The quantitative approach involved counting and calculating the frequency, percentage, and ranking of syntactic errors, while the qualitative method was adopted to explain these errors. The instrument for collecting data was argumentative essays written by 37 third-year English majors enrolling in Writing-5 at Van Lang University. Microsoft Word was used to collect and analyze syntactic errors and sentence structures, while Microsoft Excel was employed to calculate the frequency and rank of these errors and structures. The results found that the five most frequent errors in their essays were at the noun phrase and sentence levels. These errors included run-on sentences, preposition errors, article errors, sentence fragments, and pronoun errors. Through error analysis, it was indicated that the majority of errors made by students were due to the negative transfer from their first language and the literal translation. Based on the findings, language teachers and syllabus designers could use these results as guidance to design appropriate teaching methods and materials.

The study described in this article evaluates the effectiveness of methods of improving phonetic, grammatical, and syntactic skills in children with general speech underdevelopment in a bilingual environment. The method is based on a theoretical study of severe speech disorders, a structural analysis of linguistic samples, and a comparative study of the results of research by various scientists in an interdisciplinary discourse. An experimental study was carried out concerning the assessment of the effectiveness of speech therapy exercises for forming linguistic skills (phonetic-phonemic, morphological, word-formation, lexical, and syntactic) at different language levels in preschoolers with a general speech disorder in the context of bilingualism (Kazakh was considered the main language, and Russian was considered an additional language). The materials presented in this paper can be used to develop linguistic skills for various speech defects.

The purpose of this research is to describe the challenges and factors causing difficulties of deaf students in mastering writing skills at inclusive universities in Indonesia. This research is focused in Central Java province because of the more universities are considered as inclusive universities. This research was conducted in September-December 2022. The subjects in this research were selected using the purposive sampling method. Based on these limits, 35 Deaf students from six inclusive universities were obtained as respondents. The data collection techniques used questionnaires, observations, interviews, and concentrated discussions. Furthermore, the data analysis steps undertaken consisted of: (a) data analysis, (b) data revision, and (c) data verification. The results of this research concluded that the challenges experienced by students were broadly related to: (a) difficulty in mastering vocabulary, (b) understanding punctuation, and (c) difficulty if mastering complex sentences. As for more specifically related to academic text writing skills, the obstacles experienced by students including: (a) composing effective sentences, (b) developing paragraphs, (c) paraphrasing techniques, (d) writing academic texts in accordance with linguistic rules, and (e) writing bibliography. Furthermore, factors causing the occurrence of the obstacles in the mastery of academic text writing skills including: (a) unaccessible learning resources, (b) less effectively interwoven communication during lectures, and (c) different sentence structure in Sign Language with Indonesian sentence structure.

This study investigated college Chinese a second language learners' word segmentation error patterns in reading instructional-level Chinese sentences, the relationship between word segmentation errors and reading comprehension, and learners' perspectives on the role of word segmentation in reading comprehension. The results showed that the learners made five types of word segmentation errors. Four of these types moderately correlated with reading comprehension. The survey data showed that most learners considered word segmentation skills important in reading comprehension. This perception became stronger as the learning level advanced. The learners suggested that three factors hindered them from performing accurate word segmentations.

With the proliferation of corpora, various syntactic analysis methodologies have been developed. However, syntactic analysis of Chinese sentences demands a theory that focuses more on word order and the interaction between content and function words, which is satisfied by pattern grammar theory. This study investigates the effectiveness of pattern grammar theory in the analysis of Chinese sentence structure and explores the linguistic characteristics of official documents by establishing a description system for structural complexity in Chinese. Statistical methods such as skewness, kurtosis, and correlation analyses were employed to evaluate the system's performance. The findings confirm the effectiveness of pattern grammar in analyzing Chinese sentence structure by showing that it can accurately reflect the unique properties of Chinese official documents, such as the preference for fixed collocations, declarative sentences, and flat structures. Based on the above findings, this study provides a semantically compatible and innovative theoretical system for analyzing Chinese sentence structures.

Primary school students rely heavily on textbooks for instruction. Using the variety of textbooks, a description of the theme textbooks' linguistic quality is conspicuously absent, particularly for students in the fifth grade. Language fit for students' growth, communicative language, and coherence and cohesiveness were all included in this study's analysis of textbooks' language quality. Qualitative content analysis was used in this study's methodology. All texts from the heat and transfer-themed of fifth-grade textbooks published by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture, Yudhistira, and Erlangga publishers were included in the study. Documentation was utilized to collect the data. Sample, record, reduce, infer, and narrate were all data analysis approaches used. The findings of this research indicated that the three publishers' textbooks had excellent language quality in terms of language compatibility for students' growth and the communicative language issued by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture and Erlangga was wonderful, but Yudhistira was awful. There were a lot of solid points made in the Ministry of Education and Culture's publications. Both Yudhistira and Erlangga performed admirably. The quality of textbook language was found to be satisfactory in this study.

While writing has evolved away from the conventional method of using pens and paper in favor of digital tools (Li et al., 2019), English teachers continue to face difficulties in teaching writing. This study shows how mind-mapping and the program, Writeabout, can be merged for online writing classes in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classrooms. It reports on a classroom-based research with a qualitative research design which includes class observations and essay analysis of first-year undergraduate students enrolled in the Railway Mechanical Technology program in Indonesia during the academic year 2020/2021. The analysis of students' essays via TOEIC-adopted writing criteria showed that the students lacked competence in vocabulary (range: 2-5), grammar (range: 2-5), and sentence quality (range: 2-5). However, their text organization skills were a bit higher (range: 3-7), which was likely due to the course instructions incorporation of mind-mapping techniques. The findings revealed that incorporating the mind-mapping technique and the Writeabout application into online writing lessons can have a positive effect on students' writing.

This study aims to investigate the types and functions of expressions of fear realized in the form of sentences. With a special context in horror movies, the researcher attempted to reveal the types and functions of fear expressions such as directive, commissive, expressive, assertive, and declarative. This research focuses on the subtitles of the Stranger Things season 1 series with 8 episodes, one of the best-selling serial films on the Netflix application. As research aids, the researcher used the Aegisub application and live transcript to ensure the accuracy of speech data. Findings suggest the dominance of the use of directive speech acts as a form of expression of fear. Then, commanding speech is the function of most utterances found as an expression of fear. This study concludes that expressions of fear realized in sentences do not only exist in expressive speech acts but also in other speech acts such as directive, assertive and commissive.

This study revisits and extends McManus and Marsden (2019a) to better understand "how" and "why" providing additional explicit information (EI) about learners' first language (L1) alongside EI and comprehension practice in the second language (L2) improved the accuracy, speed, and stability of L2 comprehension of the French "Imparfait," a functionally complex and late-acquired target feature. Building on previous L2 research that has provided instruction about L1 without analyzing L1 knowledge/use, the current study examines learners' item-by-item comprehension of L1 sentences that was completed during the L2 instruction to better understand the learning mechanisms at play in McManus and Marsden's (2019a) findings. Two groups of English-speaking learners (L2+L1, L2+L1prac; N = 36) received the same EI about aspect in French, followed by comprehension practice of French and English sentences. The L2+L1 group received additional EI about aspect in English. Results showed no impact of the instruction on L1 accuracy in either group, but the speed of L1 comprehension changed over time in the L2+L1 group. It is argued that the L2+L1 instruction directed attention to and clarified crosslinguistic differences in how L2 and L1 express the same meanings, which rendered the L2 practice more effective for noticing "Imparfait" and developing appropriate strategies for processing L2 forms. Implications for theory-building and instructional design are discussed.

The role of context in cloze tests has long been seen as both a benefit as well as a complication in their usefulness as a measure of second language comprehension (Brown, 2013). Passage cohesion, in particular, would seem to have a relevant and important effect on the degree to which cloze items function and the interpretability of performances (Brown, 1983; Dastjerdi & Talebinezhad, 2006; Oller & Jonz, 1994). With recent evidence showing that cloze items can require examinees to access information at both the sentence and passage level (Trace, 2020), it's worthwhile to now look back and examine the relationship between aspects of passage cohesion--referential cohesion, semantic overlap, and incidence of conjunctives--and item difficulty by classification. The current study draws upon a large pool of cloze test passages and items (k = 377) originally used by Brown (1993) along with automated text analysis of cohesion ("Coh-Metrix," McNamara et al., 2014) to examine the impact of passage cohesion on item function. Correlations, factor analysis, and linear regression point to clear though minimal differences for both sentential and intersentential items as they relate to aspects of passage cohesion, the results of which may inform future test design and interpretation of cloze performance.

Students can learn in a meaningful way through the use of educational games. When students apply their skills and information in order to progress through a game, a huge degree of engagement is generated among them in the classroom as a result both their capabilities and their learning increase. 153 children from primary schools in Vietnam participated in this research. The children were split into two groups: an experimental and a control group. Both groups participated in two sessions of word and sentence practice as well as spelling instruction. According to the findings of the study, the educational outcomes of the students are greatly improved when games are used in their classrooms. In addition, research has shown that some teachers are against the use of games in the classroom since it makes it more difficult to prepare educational materials. Some educators believe that playing educational games is a more effective method of instruction as it allows for greater flexibility during the learning process. This makes a contribution to the theoretical framework that is necessary to guide educators and instructors in the process of improving learning game programs for children in primary schools and other learners.

Generative AIs such as Google Bard are known to be equipped with techniques and grammatical principles of human language based on a large corpus of text and code that allow them to generate natural-sounding language, and also identify and correct grammatical errors in human-written texts. Still, they are not perfect language generators, and this paper reports some interesting errors produced by Google Bard regarding interpretation of English plain and reflexive pronouns. Although Google Bard is clearly well aware of how to locate the antecedents for English pronouns, it consistently produces seemingly random interpretation errors when the prompt asks it to create a short story based on test sentences containing a plain or a reflexive pronoun. Since it is quite evident that Google Bard does not have an inborn system of grammatical principles including the binding principles, which are used to account for how human beings deal with pronoun interpretation, other approaches to processing human language need to be considered to explain Google Bard's errors and the underlying mechanisms leading up to the errors. Thus, a processing account based on the Emergentist approach (O'Grady, 2005) and the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach model (Sperlich, 2020) is adopted, and the two separate levels of processing, that is, sentence processing and pragmatic processing, are introduced to account for Google Bard's errors and the human language interpretation mechanism that might be underlying. These findings can not only shed light on how generative AIs might be analyzing human language but also contribute to our better understanding of human language and related theories.

Machine translation (MT) is the automated process of translating text between different languages, encompassing a wide range of language pairs. This study focuses on non-professional bilingual speakers of Turkish and English, aiming to assess their ability to discern accuracy in machine translations and their preferences regarding MT. A particular emphasis is placed on the linguistically subtle yet semantically meaningful concept of evidentiality. In this experimental investigation, 36 Turkish-English bilinguals, comprising both early and late bilinguals, were presented with simple declarative sentences. These sentences varied in their evidential meaning, distinguishing between firsthand and non-firsthand evidence. The participants were then provided with MT of these sentences in both translation directions (Turkish to English and English to Turkish) and asked to identify the accuracy of these translations. Additionally, participants were queried about their preference for MT in four crucial domains: medical, legal, academic, and daily contexts. The findings of this study indicated that late bilinguals exhibited a superior ability to detect translation accuracy, particularly in the case of firsthand evidence translations, compared to their early bilingual counterparts. Concerning the preference for MT, age of acquisition and the accuracy detection of non-firsthand sentence translations emerged as significant predictors.

Computational models of infant word-finding typically operate over transcriptions of infant-directed speech corpora. It is now possible to test models of word segmentation on speech materials, rather than transcriptions of speech. We propose that such modeling efforts be conducted over the speech of the experimental stimuli used in studies measuring infants' capacity for learning from spoken sentences. Correspondence with infant outcomes in such experiments is an appropriate benchmark for models of infants. We demonstrate such an analysis by applying the DP-Parser model of Algayres and colleagues to auditory stimuli used in infant psycholinguistic experiments by Pelucchi and colleagues. The DP-Parser model takes speech as input, and creates multiple overlapping embeddings from each utterance. Prospective words are identified as clusters of similar embedded segments. This allows segmentation of each utterance into possible words, using a dynamic programming method that maximizes the frequency of constituent segments. We show that DP-Parse mimics American English learners' performance in extracting words from Italian sentences, favoring the segmentation of words with high syllabic transitional probability. This kind of computational analysis over actual stimuli from infant experiments may be helpful in tuning future models to match human performance.

While previous investigations on online machine translation (MT) in language learning have analyzed how second language (L2) learners use and post-edit MT output, no study as of yet has investigated how the learners process MT errors and what factors affect this process using response and reading times. The present study thus investigates L2 processing of MT errors that are caused by syntactic, morphological, and semantic differences between the source and target language and also examines how L2 proficiency and visual display affect this process. Forty-seven Korean learners of English participated in an acceptability judgment task in which they read a Korean sentence and then its translated counterpart in English and had to judge the accuracy of the translated sentence on a four-point scale. The response latencies for the accuracy judgment as well as the total reading times of source and target sentences were measured. The results revealed that: (a) learners generally find it harder to reject mistranslations than to accept correct translations, (b) high and low proficiency learners focus on different aspects of language when processing translated output, and (c) constant visual access to the source text does not facilitate but rather interferes with processing MT errors.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is increasingly adopted globally, including in Taiwan's educational initiatives, yet challenges remain in implementing effective CLIL practices, such as pedagogy and curriculum design. This study investigated the effectiveness of multimodal task designs, combining hands-on learning with poster presentations, in enhancing oral communicative competence within CLIL contexts. Employing a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental design with a comparative case study framework, the study assessed English oral communicative competence in four intact fourth-grade Taiwanese CLIL Social Studies classes. The hands-on learning group (EG, n = 40) engaged in activities like Chinese Dumpling Making, Bird's Nest Building, and Succulent Pot Designing, while the non-hands-on learning group (CG, n = 34) used traditional worksheets on the same topics. Both groups proceeded to poster presentations within their multimodal task design, where students' oral communicative competence was assessed using rubrics developed based on Coyle's 4Cs dimensions, focusing on Content, Communication, and Cognition. Additionally, students' cultural knowledge related to the hands-on topics was evaluated through written tests. To complement the quantitative data, qualitative data from self-reported reflections and video recordings documenting interventions were collected for the assessment of oral communicative competence within a CLIL framework. Results demonstrate that integrating hands-on activities significantly enhanced procedural content, communication (i.e., sentence complexity, pronunciation accuracy for target vocabulary, presentation fluency), and cognitive abilities, confirming the efficacy of multimodal learning approaches in fostering linguistic and cognitive engagement. Post-test comparisons show the EG's superiority in cultural knowledge acquisition across all three hands-on topics. Student reflections endorsed the enrichment of learning experiences through multimodal task design. Video analysis of both groups' interventions revealed that despite significant engagement and autonomy, EG students commonly utilized general English rather than target vocabulary, a pattern similar to that observed in the CG. These findings highlight the potential of diverse modalities in CLIL to enhance English content learning and oral skills, shaping future pedagogy and language strategies in Taiwan. The study also emphasizes the role of embodied learning, the interplay between physical actions and cognitive processes, to facilitate deeper understanding and engagement with subject matter within CLIL settings.

Writing can improve children's speaking, boost their reading comprehension, build their knowledge, and elevate their thinking. However a reason it may be hard to learn is that without explicit writing instruction, children often write the way they speak. From elementary through high school, many children answer questions with little elaboration. Others tend to ramble on, giving unnecessary information in a disorganized fashion. It is not unusual to see the same tendencies in their writing. This article shares some strategies a child can use to become a clear thinker and coherent communicator.

This paper is set up to outline the most common challenges in writing short sentences encountered by the first-year students at the English language departments at Al-Baha University campuses. The study is considered necessary because it raises the awareness of both students and instructors to improve their sentence writing. A mixed approach (quantitative and qualitative) was used to collect the data using questionnaires and interviews. Approximately122 students who study English as a Foreign Language (EFL), (%50.4 females and %49.6 males), together with 30 EFL instructors (15 males and 15 females) who were randomly selected. The paper addresses three questions. They are: (1) What common challenges do students face when writing short sentences?; (2) What are the most frequent challenging short sentence components among the students?; and (3) What are the differences between male and female students regarding difficulties in writing short sentences?. The study found significant challenges in constructing short sentences, distinguishing between active and passive voice, and using conjunctions, punctuation, quantifiers, and appropriate auxiliary verbs. Additionally, students encountered difficulties in building short sentences. Moreover, the study revealed that a high percentage of students have very low English writing skills practice. To overcome any obstacles and push students forward in their learning later, this study highly recommended that EFL instructors should pay more attention to the development of writing skills. Thus, extra written activities and peer assessment must be granted to students in writing short sentences. Moreover, more research should be done to explore and evaluate the most prevalent problems and barriers that first-year students encounter using written samples and paperwork.

Conditional sentences are difficult for EFL students to understand because of their complexity in both form and function. By analyzing the performances and opinions among EFL learners, the pedagogical contribution may be beneficial for both EFL students and teachers. The use, errors, and perceptions of Thai EFL students regarding conditional sentences were explored in this study. Instruments of the study included a chapter test, writing assignments, and an online survey. Data were analyzied by means of Google Form and AntConc software. The results of the test revealed that the participants performed best on the zero conditional type, while the first conditionals were used the most in their writing. Findings of the error analysis revealed that some difficulties in the use of tense were widely occurring such as using present progressive instead of present simple tense on the if-clause for zero type. Following that, the participants believed that the second conditionals were the most difficult, while the zero conditionals were the easiest.

Information technology provides a lot of convenience for humans in completing their tasks and getting results according to targets. In line with that, language teachers have a duty to find out the level of language skills and forms of language errors in students. Machine Learning as part of technology can be maximized to detect forms of Arabic speaking error in students. This study was conducted with a qualitative approach. Data were collected via SIAKAD machine learning containing Arabic videos. Based on the results, the SIAKAD machine learning uncovered several Arabic speaking errors such as grammar, pronunciation, shifat al-huruf, vowels, word expression, and concatenated sentences. Therefore, machine learning with various types can be maximized in Arabic learning which ultimately leads to technological developments that must be accompanied by the ability of teachers to be skilled in operationalizing technology.

People frequently struggle with comprehending the text they read and require more intensive support to develop proficiency in reading comprehension. Some find it perplexing observing all the elements and constituents of the paragraph theory. Good readers, however, can understand what a paragraph is by studying the conjunction relationships between sentences and group of sentences in the paragraph and can also understand the organization of the text by analyzing the conjunction relationships in a paragraph or a text when they deal with a written text. Such analysis of the conjunction relationships in a paragraph or a text can be used as a basis for understanding how the author organizes and presents materials. The inspiration of structuralist view of education is that students need to learn and discover the structure of knowledge. The research methods of the paper are ones of knowledge, experience, observation, logical reasoning and keen analysis of English examples or materials. This paper provides guidance for the skills of logical relationship comprehension, text structure determination and main idea dentification, and introduces some practices of using the skills. These skills have brought us some findings: We can use the conjunction relationships between the sentences in a paragraph to determine the structure of the paragraph, whether they are signaled or unsignaled, including finding the main idea; The contextual clues can be adverbs, pronouns, nouns, verbs, and preposition groups besides conjunctions; Items in one type of relationships are of equal weight and one sentence in another type of relationships is given more importance than the others; There is a relationship between the type of conjunction relationship involved and the location of the topic sentence; The role of the main idea or topic sentence is not in whether it always provides important information, but in its organizational function. These findings guide readers to apply the knowledge of paragraph organization system to help them deal with English texts.

English children's songs have been commonly used as pedagogical tools to teach English to young learners. Despite its popularity, few studies focus on its limitation. This study aimed to explore pre-and in-service teachers' perceptions on the usage of English Children's songs in teaching English to young learners. This study applied a qualitative descriptive method involving two pre-service teachers, two in-service teachers, and four students. Data were collected through pre- and in-service teachers' interviews, students' interviews, and classroom observation. The findings showed that English children's songs offer numerous benefits for young learners in learning English. However, there were technical limitations such as lack of internet connection and school facilities and non-technical limitations such as selecting the right song for the students and providing various songs to prevent students' boredom. To overcome those limitations, it is suggested that the school facilitate teachers with proper technology such as a projector and speaker to improve the students' teaching and learning activities. The teachers could prepare the songs using rubrics based on learning needs and lesson plans.

Paragraph structure has been identified as consisting of three distinct parts, which are the topic sentence, supporting sentences, and a paragraph ending sentence. Although topic sentences have been widely researched, similar consideration for paragraph endings has been less forthcoming. This discrepancy may be problematic as research suggests that instruction on textual endings can positively impact students' writing. With this issue in mind, the current study establishes a model for paragraph endings and discusses pedagogical and computational implications. The model stems from the categorization of the varieties of paragraph endings observed in a corpus of papers written by advanced ESL college-students in the Arabian Peninsula. We identified the varieties of paragraph endings to form a multi-dimensional model featuring the categories of 'goal,' 'type,' and 'cue.' 'Goal' refers to the function of the sentence (e.g., summarizing). 'Type' refers to whether the sentence is a claim or a support statement. 'Cue' refers to explicit language indicating the goal. The model was assessed quantitatively through interrater-reliability of expert-judge evaluations. Qualitative analysis was also incorporated to assess possible subjective differences. Quantitative analysis provided validation of the model. Specifically, even with the most conservative analysis, the findings show that 67.5% of the total assessments agreed, with 75% agreement for goal and 70% agreement for type. The subsequent qualitative analysis also broadly supported the quantitative findings. The study concludes that the validated model has viable implications for pedagogical practices and software development. Thus, the study provides a pathway that may benefit students in the writing of more effective paragraphs.

The present research sought to explore the combined contribution of input flooding, visual input enhancement, and consciousness-raising tasks on noticing and intake of the present perfect tense among Iranian EFL learners. Using a nonrandomized control group pretest-posttest design, the researchers attempted to see if instruction could enhance the intake and noticing of the targeted form. To this end, through convenience sampling, 65 lower intermediate learners of English were selected. The subjects were divided into a control group (N=32) and an experimental group (N=33). The experimental subjects were exposed to the three pedagogical techniques while the control subjects did not receive the techniques. The results of the independent samples t-test showed that the experimental group who had received seven teaching interventions significantly outperformed the control group. Furthermore, the obtained results from a chi-square goodness of fit revealed that during the consciousness-raising phase of the study, the experimental participants paid attention the most to the targeted form. The pedagogical implication of the current investigation is that ESL/EFL teachers can simultaneously implement these three techniques in their classes for the learners to both notice and intake the targeted form. Another implication of this research is that material developers can apply the findings of this study in the materials they are going to develop in the future.

This study aimed to utilize sentiment and sentence similarity analyses, two Natural Language Processing techniques, to see if and how well they could predict L2 Writing Performance in integrated and independent task conditions. The data sources were an integrated L2 writing corpus of 185 literary analysis essays and an independent L2 writing corpus of 500 argumentative essays, both of which were compiled in higher education contexts. Both essay groups were scored between 0 and 100. Two Python libraries, TextBlob and SpaCy, were used to generate sentiment and sentence similarity data. Using sentiment (polarity and subjectivity) and sentence similarity variables, regression models were built and 95% prediction intervals were compared for integrated and independent corpora. The results showed that integrated L2 writing performance could be predicted by subjectivity and sentence similarity. However, only subjectivity predicted independent L2 writing performance. The prediction interval of subjectivity for independent writing model was found to be narrower than the same interval for integrated writing. The results show that the sentiment and sentence similarity analysis algorithms can be used to generate complementary data to improve more complex multivariate L2 writing performance prediction models.

Communication is an important part of our life. The realization of the communication and the achievement of its purpose is possible by understanding the function of the linguistic units used by the speaker or the text producer. In this case, the communication functions of the language, which is an important part of communication, must be known/recognised. Linguists, sociologists, and psychologists have taken different approaches to classify the functions of language. One of these approaches is the classification made by Roman Jakobson from the Prague linguistics school. Jakobson considers exchanging information between addresser and addressee as an essential element in communication. He also states that language has six functions: expressiveness, referent, call, relationship, metalanguage function and artistic function. In this research, the narrative texts of Turkish teacher candidates were examined in terms of the functions of the language by using Jakobson's approach. The model of the research is case study as it covers both the collection of field-based data, and the process is related to evaluations. Data were collected through documents during the process. The documents of the research are the narrative texts prepared by the 2nd year Turkish Language Teaching students studying at a state university within the scope of the linguistics course. The results of the study showed that there is a significant difference between the pre-service teachers' use of language functions in the narrative texts they wrote before learning Roman Jakobson's classification of language functions and the narrative texts they wrote after learning.

Most people want to be able to read their reading materials quicker and remember them effectively. Covering a large quantity of reading materials at a normal speed requires much more time than is usually available. Good readers, however, can cover a lot of materials by identifying key elements of a sentence for key idea with the help of connectives when skimming. Constructivism theory emphasizes that students need to actively construct the meaning of their knowledge they have learned, and actively explore and discover knowledge. Syntax is the core of the whole language system with syntactic structure occupying a macroscopic and important position in improving students' language ability and language level in a real sense. This paper introduces and analyzes how to identify key elements of a sentence for key idea with the help of connectives under constructivism so as to find a practical and feasible reading strategy when skimming. It is advised that readers glance at secondary sentences by reading the connectives as they are helpful in getting possible additional information while successfully identifying key elements of a sentence for key idea. The method fundamentally helps students improve their reading speed and develop their skimming understanding ability. The research methods of this paper are the ones of experience, literature review, theoretical basis, the main language order and keen analysis. This paper concludes by understanding the method of identifying key elements of a sentence for key idea with the help of connectives in skimming practice when reading under constructivism theory and its role is to guide readers to apply the knowledge of subject-predicate-object grammatical rule as the main language order in the skimming practice to help readers to get the general meaning of a sentence, paragraph, passage and a text.

The current study aimed to investigate the tendency to use temporal markers (TMs) in English writing by three different levels of Thai writers. Data used in this study were based on the Corpus of Thai Writers of English. The corpus size of approximately 8,800,000 words consisted of essay writing produced by intermediate and advanced student writers and professional writers from two Thai English newspapers. Fraser's (2005) taxonomy of temporal markers was used as an analytical framework. Microsoft Excel was used to calculate the frequency of occurrences, while a Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was the primary research tool for data analysis. A one-way ANOVA reveals a statistical difference in the use of TMs among three groups of writers (p =0.000). The intermediate and professional writers were found to prefer using temporal markers at a comparable ratio. However, the intermediate group used temporal markers in a more diverse attitude than the advanced ones. Six temporal markers ("as soon as," "immediately," "meantime," "meanwhile," "originally," and "subsequently") were hardly utilized in writing by all groups of writers. However, no significant differences were found regarding preferences on the position of the TM in the sentences. The findings improve teaching and learning of cohesive devices, especially temporal markers, in EFL writing classes.

The present study aimed to analyse the context-based problem solutions of pre-service mathematics teachers, their mathematical sentences formation skills and misconceptions. Thus, the participating pre-service mathematics teachers were asked to solve context-based problems, form mathematical sentences formation, predict misconceptions that they could experience in solving these problems and assess the related problems based on Benckert's (1997) contextual learning principles. Furthermore, the views of pre-service mathematics teachers on contextual problems were also obtained. Thus,the study was designed as a mixed-method case study that included both quantitative and qualitative data. Context-Based Problem Evaluation Form and a structured interview form developed by the authors were used as data collection instruments. Study participants included 114 (82 females, 32 males) pre-service mathematics teachers. Analysis of the study data demonstrated that preservice mathematics teachers were above-average in solving contextual problems and mathematical sentences formation, their misconceptions were below-average, and there were no significant differences between the above-mentioned study variables based on gender variable; however, there were significant differences based on student department, and mean participant score was above-average based on Benckert's principles. Furthermore, the views of pre-service mathematics teachers on contextual problems were determined and the conceptual and structural differences between the questions were analyzed.

The study investigates which grammar features need high priority of pedagogical intervention to develop implicit knowledge, unlike grammatical features in need of explanation of explicit rules. Two types of data were collected from 29 Korean college students: a sentence completion test in English and a meta-linguistic knowledge test (requiring students to both correct the underlined error and explain the grammatical rule) in Korean. Through statistical analyses, including a Wilcoxon signed rank test, this study finds significant differences in test achievements for tense, time prepositions ("for" and "since"), subjunctive moods, dative alternations, quantitative adjectives ("many" and "much"), gerunds, and third-person singular "-s" in the simple present tense. Based on results obtained, this study proposes which specific grammar features need intensive pedagogical intervention for production skills, including sentence writing and speaking. Several practical suggestions are provided for EFL instructors and researchers to make more effective use of speaking and writing activities as well as formative testing.

This study aimed to investigate the production of stress in English compound nouns and phrasal verbs by L1 Thai learners. Based on the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Corder, 1982; Selinker, 1972), it was hypothesized that (1) there is a positive relationship between English proficiency levels and accuracy in stress assignment in compound nouns and phrasal verbs; and (2) L1 Thai learners' systematicity of L2 English stress placement is influenced by L1 transfer. The participants were 60 first-year undergraduates who were equally divided into two groups, namely intermediate and advanced groups, based on their English proficiency levels. All the participants were required to read sentences containing three different types of compound nouns in the first task and read sentences containing compound nouns and their corresponding phrasal verbs in the second task. Their readings were analyzed using an independent-samples t-test and ANOVA. Although the advanced learners outperformed their intermediate counterpNaarts in assigning stress in both tasks, the statistical results indicated a correlation between English proficiency levels and accuracy in stress placement only in compound nouns, but not in phrasal verbs. It was assumed that such systematicity found in the learners' IL resulted from the interlanguage factor of language transfer.

This study uses Technology Embedded Explicit Activity in Teaching Sentences in a Dialogue is a more relevant and interesting for students. The objective of this study is to serve as a basis and reference for students in teaching sentences in a dialogue. The explicit activity, teacher does first approach to students by giving examples of what sentences of dialogue describe and demonstrate, then guiding them step-by-step about what they have learned in constructing sentences in a dialogue in terms of tone, clarity, convention etc. For them to enhance and improve their communication skills and academic performance effectively. The major concern of this study is to determine the effectiveness of Technology Embedded Explicit Activity in Teaching Sentences in a Dialogue English 3 as an innovation. The study assessed Grade 3 learners to improve their communication skills in the selected private school students in the Schools Division of San Jose del Monte, Bulacan. The Respondents of the study were purposively selected which comprised of Thirty (30) students of Colegio De San Gabriel Arcangel from the private school students in the Schools Division of San Jose del Monte, Bulacan. The researcher used Weighted Mean and T Test to analyze quantitative data and determine the effectiveness of the utilization of Technology Embedded Explicit Activity in Teaching Sentences in a Dialogue English 3. The findings showed that the learners' level of sentence construction in a Dialogue was Average. The researcher also used one - group pretest - posttest design. In this design, a single group of subjects is given a pretest. The study revealed there is a significant difference in the pretest and posttest score of the students in the utilization of the Innovation in improving the learners' Level in Constructing Sentences in a Dialogue.

Textbooks, which have a very important place in educational activities, are also a widely used material in teaching Turkish to foreigners. Therefore, the texts in these textbooks play an effective role in learning. For this reason, it is very important to determine the readability levels of Turkish teaching textbooks for foreigners. The aim of this research is to determine the readability levels of the reading texts in the Turkish Journey A1 and Turkish Journey A2 textbooks prepared for teaching Turkish to foreigners. Document analysis, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the study. In the study, the syllable, word and sentence lengths of the reading texts in the textbooks were calculated. The obtained data were analyzed with the Flesch formula adapted to Turkish by Atesman (1997) and the readability levels of the reading texts were determined. Then, the reading texts in the books were compared in terms of ease and difficulty. According to the results obtained, it has been determined that the reading texts of both textbooks are generally of medium difficulty, easy and very easy. In addition, it was determined that the Turkish Journey A2 textbook and the Turkish Journey A1 textbook consisted of more difficult texts. As a result, it was determined that both books consisted of reading texts suitable for A1 and A2 levels.

The quality of any academic essay highly depends on cohesion and coherence since they affect the overall quality and the tone of the writing to a great extent. Conjunctive adverbials are among the types of devices which logically help linking sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into essays. Conjunctive Adverbials ultimately affect the cohesion and coherence of any piece of writing. This paper investigates conjunctive adverbials in essays written by Iraqi Kurd EFL learners at the undergraduate level. It explicitly attempts to discover what specific conjunctive adverbials types are overused, underused, or misused and in what positions in sentences. A learner corpus of 50 complete essays was compiled for this study. The findings showed that the participants tended to use more sequential and additive conjunctive adverbials than adversative and causals. Additionally, the results demonstrated that the learners relied heavily on a limited number of conjunctive adverbials, mainly in the initial position. However, the conjunctive adverbial category affects its place in the sentence.

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) are more likely to struggle with spoken language than their age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH), and new language processing literature suggests that these challenges may be linked to delays in spoken word recognition. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children with CIs use language knowledge via semantic prediction to facilitate recognition of upcoming words and help compensate for uncertainties in the acoustic signal. Method: Five- to 10-year-old children with CIs heard sentences with an informative verb (draws) or a neutral verb (gets) preceding a target word (picture). The target referent was presented on a screen, along with a phonologically similar competitor (pickle). Children's eye gaze was recorded to quantify efficiency of access of the target word and suppression of phonological competition. Performance was compared to both an age-matched group and vocabulary-matched group of children with NH. Results: Children with CIs, like their peers with NH, demonstrated use of informative verbs to look more quickly to the target word and look less to the phonological competitor. However, children with CIs demonstrated less efficient use of semantic cues relative to their peers with NH, even when matched for vocabulary ability. Conclusions: Children with CIs use semantic prediction to facilitate spoken word recognition but do so to a lesser extent than children with NH. Children with CIs experience challenges in predictive spoken language processing above and beyond limitations from delayed vocabulary development. Children with CIs with better vocabulary ability demonstrate more efficient use of lexical-semantic cues. Clinical interventions focusing on building knowledge of words and their associations may support efficiency of spoken language processing for children with CIs.

Sound based sentence method has been used since the 2005-2006 academic year in Turkey. However, criticism of these methods has brought the search for new methods to the agenda. One of these methods is sentence-based sound teaching method, which can be evaluated under the title of mixed methods specific to Turkish language. In the sentence-based sound teaching method, it is aimed to teach reading and writing with simple and regular sentences, reaching sounds in a short time and analyzing-synthesis-analysis logic. This process has five stages: "sentence stage, sentence completion stage, analysis, synthesis and evaluation". The aim of this research is to evaluate the results of the sentence-based sound teaching method in practice according to the opinions of a primary school teacher and six teacher candidates. This research was designed as a case study from qualitative research patterns. It was carried out with a classroom teacher who stated that she had two students having difficulty in learning reading and writing in her classroom in a primary school in Mugla Province Center in 2018-2019 Spring Semester, and 6 volunteer teacher candidates who are registered to Mugla University Faculty of Education Primary Education Program and want to learn how to carry out their reading and writing activities in the first grades. Purposeful and criterion sampling methods were used to create the working group. The data were obtained by interview method and analyzed by descriptive analysis technique. In the heading of the findings, the opinions of the classroom teachers and teacher candidates who applied the sentence-based sound teaching method were evaluated under three sub-headings as "before application, during application and after application" impressions. The teacher candidates who applied the method in company with the class teacher also found the method useful. It was determined that it served their purpose and stated that they wanted to use the method when they became teachers.

This study investigates the use of high-frequency cognitive verbs - think and believe - in Turkish L2 learners' interlanguage, both in terms of their verb senses and complementation patterns. In line with this purpose, a Sentence Production Task consisting of context-independent items and a Sentence Completion Task consisting of context-dependent items were developed by using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). These tasks were applied to 182 students at four different vocabulary levels. The findings indicated that the learners showed a strong tendency to use verb think in the verb sense of expressing a personal opinion and in the complementation pattern of [zero that-CL]. Along with these results, the acceptability levels of learners' productions with the verbs think and believe showed differences. The learners had problems with the use of believe more than they had with the verb think. The findings have pedagogical implications by shedding light on the learner preferences for verb complementation patterns and senses. The findings also provide an insight into the learners' performance on the syntactic and semantic properties of the cognitive verbs through context-dependent and independent tasks.

The present study investigated the identification of end of first grade (n = 125) and end of third grade (n = 77) reading comprehension difficulties using beginning of first grade decoding-related and language-related predictors. Reading comprehension was defined using a composite of three standardized reading comprehension measures. Students at or below the 25th percentile on the reading comprehension composite were considered to have difficulty with reading comprehension. Sight word reading efficiency and sentence repetition predicted end of first grade reading comprehension difficulties. Sight word reading efficiency, sentence repetition, and oral discourse predicted end of third grade reading comprehension difficulties. Both screening batteries yielded high classification accuracy (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC] = 94.7% in Grade 1 and AUC = 90.5% in Grade 3). Results are discussed in light of the research base on early screening for reading comprehension difficulties.

Several strategies that demonstrate promise are available for educators to improve reading comprehension outcomes for students. However, some students, including students with and at risk for learning disabilities, require more intensive supports to develop proficiency in reading comprehension. To support these students, teachers must intensify instruction. This article describes an intensive main idea identification strategy, "sentence-level gist," for teachers to use with students with persistent reading comprehension difficulties in the co-taught classroom. The sentence-level gist strategy requires students to determine the subject and important words in each sentence and then synthesize this information to write a main idea statement for a section of a text.